Sweet Ones

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Enjoy.

Science, the Sun, and El Niño

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The science is settled? If anything, there is overwhelming evidence that science stands in stark contradiction to the simplistic global warming story peddled by politicians and the media. The basic driver and long-term determinant of climate change is the sun—plus many other factors among which human emissions are negligible—, with shorter term variations in temperatures generated by El Niño events—again with human emissions playing an insignificant role.

“Introduction: Several recent studies of solar–geomagnetic effects on climate have been examined on both global as well as on regional scales.  The Sun’s long-term magnetic variability is the primary driver of climatic changes. The magnetic variability (mostly short-term components) is due to the disturbances in Earth’s magnetic fields caused by the solar activity, which is usually indicated by indices of geomagnetic activity. The Sun’s magnetic variability modulates the magnetic and particulate fluxes in the heliosphere. This determines the interplanetary conditions and imposes significant electromagnetic forces and effects upon planetary atmospheres. All these effects are due to the changing solar-magnetic fields which are relevant for planetary climates, including the climate of the Earth. The Sun–Earth relationship varies on different time scales of days to years bringing a drastic influence on the climatic patterns. The ultimate cause of solar variability, at time scales from decadal to cen tennial to millennial or even longer scales, has its origin in the solar dynamo mechanism. During the solar maxima, huge amounts of solar energy particles are released, thereby causing the geomagnetic disturbances. … The 11 years solar cycle acts an important driving force for variations in the space weather, ultimately giving rise to climatic changes. Therefore, it is very important to understand the origin of space climate by analyzing the different proxies of solar magnetic variability.”
“The another most important climate variation is El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, which impact the global oceanic and atmospheric circulations which thereby produce droughts, floods and intense rainfall in certain regions. The strong coupling and interactions between the Tropical Ocean and atmosphere play a major role in the development of global climatic system. The El Niño events generally recur approximately every 3–5 years with large events spaced around 3–7 years apart. The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomena has shown huge impact on the Asian monsoon (Cole et al., 1993), Indian monsoon (Chowdary et al., 2006, 2014) as well as globally (Horel and Wallance, 1981; Barnett, 1989; Yasunari, 1985; Nicholson, 1997). In particular, the El Niño, solar, geomagnetic activities are the major affecting forces on the decadal and interdecadal temperature variability on global and regional scales in a direct/indirect way.”

Make sure to read the entire article at NoTricksZone. And take a look at this interesting link.

See also Climate Catastrophe — Klimakatastrophe?

"The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

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The Sense of an Ending, another Booker Prize winning novel that makes me wonder what the hype is all about.

The beginning is exceptionally bad: Julian Barnes offers completely decontexualised fragments from later parts of the book and dabbles in the philosophy of time perception, a theme pursued with slightly more success throughout the rest of the novel. 

The text recovers quickly from the unfortunate start. From the point of view of Tony, the narrator-main character, the story recounts early friendships and the time spent with his first girl friend during their time at University. Turning out to be an awkward character much later in life, it is not clear why the narrator treats Vanessa as if something had been seriously wrong with her from the very beginning. But that is a problem with the cast in general, whose chatters are simply asserted rather than developed, or explained. 

Their affair ends unhappily in that Vanessa happens to "trade up" by getting amorously involved with one of Tony's closest friends, Adrian the whiz-kid.

Soon after, Adrian commits suicide, and forty years later Tony's research seems to yield that Adrian and Vanessa are the parents of a mentally disabled child. 

Already retired, Tony receives a mysterious inheritance from Vanessa's mother, 500 quid and the title to Adrian's diary, which latter, however, Vanessa is refusing to hand over to him. He gets in touch with her, finding his interest in Vanessa renewed, an occasion for the author to demonstrate that memories are often uncertain. 

The end is muddled, but seems to amount to this: the disabled child is really Vanessa's brother rather than her child, her mother having given birth to a child at too old an age. 

That's the whole story.

Add to this the boring character of Tony, not an unlikeable chap, but still a perfect mediocrity, and all that remains on the credit side from reading this thankfully short novel is the enjoyment of an excellent writing style and lots of sketches, graphic, yet mostly unspectacular scenes, so skilfully drawn by an observant writer as to make readers like me drift off into pleasant meditations. A book that can do that does have a strong side.

Being muddled, the denouement is less than reader-friendly, disturbs the meditation, and fails to hold any remarkable insights. However, another strength of the book lies in introducing the reader, at least this reader, to the mindset of an unambitious grey mouse type of Mitläufer. All other characters are mere chess figures, while Tony's personality is rather comprehensively and convincingly portrayed. He reminds me strongly of Anthime.

I suspect Julian Barnes was awarded the Booker Prize in honour of having a long established reputation in the literary world, rather than for producing an outstanding piece of art.

"Amsterdam" and "1914"

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Two very short novels whose perusal I have managed to slip in between my various activities and obligations: "Amsterdam" by Ian McEwan, and "1914" by Jean Echenoz.

Amsterdam won the Booker Prize, much to my surprise. There can be no doubt that McEwan is a capable conjurer of scenes and thoughts, and he cares to develop a fast moving and suspenseful plot. Still the book does not rank with me among the more satisfying reads. The story is reminiscent of a cheap American TV drama, and is more conveniently consumed in that format than by the more arduous activity of reading a book.

Two friends, a composer and a chief-editor, come into conflict over two moral issues, eventually poisoning each other lethally at the occasion of a putative reconciliatory reunion in Amsterdam. The journalist tries to return his newspaper to former success by running a tasteless exposé on the kinky sexual preferences of a top politician, to which the composer objects, considering the matter one of private rather than public concern. The composer becomes witness to a rape but prefers to ignore the crime so as to get on with his artistic work, to which the journalist friend objects, setting the police on him. In the end both fail, the editor gets fired as his exposé damages the papers reputation more than furthering it. And the composer, prestigiously commissioned to compose a Millennial hymn, manages to produce only a poor copycat piece. In the end, the moral disagreements of the two former friends turn them into mortal enemies and they become their mutual killers.  

Frankly, there was nothing in the story that seemed to require the literary medium for exposition. The story is more suited to being delivered in form of a TV drama. 

Unlike McEwan's tiny novel, I do not regard "1914" as a disappointment or a (mild) literary failure:

1914 is a very short French novel, composed of nicely chiselled vignettes of life during the First World War. Wondering why the book, though well written, did not leave a particularly strong impression with me, I see two reasons: in the first place, stories, images, and scenes from the First World War have come to form an arsenal of associations that are part and parcel of the educated person of my time: you come to expect drastic material, and when it is delivered you look at the flash and move on. In the second place, the author fails to make the reader attach his empathy to a protagonist. The slim book is propelled by scenes and images, not by persons. In fact, the cast figure almost like literary canon fodder. In spite of all the atrocities and crimes experienced, the main character, Anthime, having lost his arm, suffering social derailment and serving as a conveniently maimed apologist-witness defending a criminal army supplier, in the last paragraph seems to be driven by thoughtless lust to expand his family by another member. 

I am not trying to say that because a person has been through hell in your life, it would be immoral for him to have offspring. To me, however, the characters of the book, including the protagonist, appear to lead the mechanical lives of people that have nothing to go by than the conventions of their time. There is a ratty smell in the air when you close the book.

This is the last paragraph:

At the hotel [they were shown] to their rooms, which were across the corridor from each other. Leaving their luggage there, Blanche and Anthime freshened up, then went out for a walk before going to dinner. Later, after each had retired to bed, there was every indication that they would both sleep in their separate rooms except that in the middle of the night Anthime woke up. He rose, crossed the corridor, pushed open Blanche's door, and went in the darkness toward the bed where she wasn't sleeping either. He lay down beside her, took her in his arm, then entered and impregnated her. And the following autumn, during the very battle at Mons that turned out to be the last one, a male infant was borne [...]  

Awakening from the Stony Sleep

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  William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

       THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 

The source.

In an interesting article, playing on W. B. Yates' famous poem of 1919, Robert Skidelsky interprets the election of Donald Trump as an event that may rejuvenate liberalism [bringing about its third coming], helping "the rough beast [a society in ideological turmoil] ... slouch[...] towards Bethlehem to be born:"

The second coming of liberalism represented by Roosevelt, Keynes, and the founders of the European Union has been destroyed by the economics of globalization: the pursuit of an ideal equilibrium through the free movement of goods, capital, and labor, with its conjoined tolerance of financial criminality, obscenely lavish rewards for a few, high levels of unemployment and underemployment, and curtailment of the state’s role in welfare provision. The resulting inequality of economic outcomes strips away the democratic veil that hides from the majority of citizens the true workings of power. 

The source.

See also my posts here and here.

Judging by the success of the movement's iconoclasm, Trump's regime is likely to change America and the world more than any other presidency has in a long time. Trumps' election has already cracked the collar of political correctness irrevocably. It is a mighty challenge to the political status quo; let us hope that it will be a healthy shock bringing much needed movement to stagnant minds. Let us hope that it will expedite fresher thinking and welcome renewal in the major factions of politics.

"The Sea, the Sea" — A Novel By Iris Murdoch

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I. Weaknesses

The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch is an excellent novel, despite its weaknesses. 

Its main weakness is in the eye of the beholder, and cannot be laid at the doorstep of the author: the story is too psychological, for my taste. And within that drawback nested I find another deficit: the author is obsessed with "love", especially the interplay of bonded and domineering "love", "love" as bondage and "love" as dominance. To be sure, Murdoch's psychological portraits are entirely credible and superbly developed. However, she is dealing with the kind of conflict that I find uninteresting because it is silly and immature, and normally amenable to exclusion from the life of someone put off by such excessive dependencies. You turn away and the problem is gone. Unless your temperament condemns you to such an unfortunate fate.

The main character, Charles, claims to never have loved a woman except his playmate of childhood days and adolescence. He keeps searching for her unsuccessfully throughout his life, until he finds her coincidentally as he withdraws for retirement to a little village by the sea.

The unlikely reunion sends Charles on a madcap chase for the long-since married, rather withdrawn and unresponsive darling of his days of youth.

Personally, I find it unconvincing that a man like Charles, who commands an extensive experience with a large number of female lovers, could retain the naive and idealistic expectations of an adolescent concerning a relationship with a woman.

But the preferences of my imagination and experience do not diminish the book's quality and credibility.

The second, and only objective weakness of the book concerns flaws that Murdoch is to be accused of in her capacity as a literary craftswoman.

At certain junctures of the story, and in fact quite frequently, she is too quick to make her characters appear in the limelight of the unfolding story. Suddenly three or four persons just happen to turn up at the remote sea resort, in incredibly dense succession and all conveniently smitten with Charles, whose house by the sea is thereby quite literally turned into a stage eagerly admitting any character useful in advancing the plot's dynamic.

These flaws (standing out mostly in the first half of the book) are annoying, because, their marginal significance notwithstanding, they destroy the exquisite authenticity of the novel, reminding one disappointingly that one is not taking part in the goings-on of real life but reading fiction. This is regrettable as Murdoch has a remarkable ability to create the illusion of authenticity, which is one of the greatest qualities a novel can have, and it is one of the hardest effects to achieve by an author.

II. Denouement and Assessment

At any rate, after a while one gets used to the rashness by which characters are being produced, and from a certain point on, the cast is complete and their entrance ceases to have a feel of incongruence. All characters are well developed and wonderfully enmeshed in a net of excellent dialogue and  felicitous soliloquy.

The action is suspenseful (will Hartley return to her first love? Is her husband going to kill Charles? etc,). The scenes are very capably set up, with appropriate economy. The reading is mostly even and fluid.

All in all, I feel, Murdoch is doing the subject matter — encountering a long lost first love — full justice. Paradoxically, this is the problem with the book.

The ultimate finding, to which Murdoch faithfully guides us, is one of disillusionment, of course. Anticipating the emotional malinvestment underlying the main narrative driver, occasionally, I have felt somewhat impatient with the exaggerated expectations of Charles', and, indeed, toward the end of the novel, my impatience is vindicated. The story comprises an awfully long investment in suspense and a sudden anti-climax that does not seem to justify the long build-up. But such is the nature of the topic.

Murdoch has done a commendable job, but to little avail, other than having produced fine entertainment. While she portrays the psychology of Charles' exaggerated hope very well, no one in his position will be be diverted from their errant course by bookish wisdom, but only by manifest disappointment. There are no foolproof manuals for falling in love.

The fact that I have thoroughly enjoyed reading "The Sea, the Sea," is not compromised when I suggest Murdoch's purpose may have been achieved by a writer of her class perhaps even more effectively if she had limited the platform to 200 pages instead of 430.


See also Iris Murdoch — Freedom, Patterns, and Love.

PS

Interestingly, the website of Booker Prize misrepresents the novel, which was awarded the prize in 1978 [my comments in brackets]:

Charles Arrowby, leading light of England’s theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin [who has virtually no significance to the story!], his mentor both professionally and personally [the memoir is not intended to be confined to that relationship!], and to amuse himself with Lizzie [to the contrary, he tries to keep her away!], an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors – some real, some spectral [spectral allusions are minimal!] – that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core.

Politics — The Dismal Practice

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... or should I call it the tragic pillar?

All things considered, I admire the politician. 

That is, the politician who does not enter the fray in bad faith and with a pathological or calculating intention to abuse his position and powers. I suspect there is an enormous gravitational pull that threatens to suck into the morass of corrupt dealings even the most morally pristine among politicians. Still, I believe there are many honest politicians, and it is these that I admire, and even some of the corrupt ones, notably those who have fought and resisted their corruption only to succumb to it at some point, tragically.

Politics is a tragic practice.

In a democracy, it is the task of politics to accomplish the impossible. Democracy makes freedom possible. One side of freedom seeks the admission and encouragement of maximal dissent in society. The other side of freedom seeks to ensure peace and productive ways of dealing with one another. For more see my The Political Logic of Freedom.

If freedom works well — that is, if democracy works well, too — we are likely to have structured the populace into adherents of sternly competing views and interests. If freedom and democracy are to make any sense, if they are to be effective, they need to ensure that peace and decency prevails among human beings in the very presence of unheard-of degrees of dissension. Managing this balance is the central task of politics.

A good politician, therefore, must seek compromise, she needs to adjust her positions in ways unforeseen by her supporters and herself; she must learn from the complicated game the political active play with one another to gain as much influence for their partisan demands as is compatible with a society that keeps totalitarianism at bay.

Another dilemma in which a politician finds herself caught up all the time is brought about by the need for firmness of creed and clarity of message; to ensure these, she will effectively have to engage in a lot of popular dogmatism. In order to attract attention and support, she will tend to be forced to make statements that appear stronger in the pulpit than they turn out once thrown into the cauldron of practical political manoeuvring and compromise.

To cut a long story short: we need people, we urgently need people to engage themselves in this kind of balancing of shifting commitments. Even the best among the politicians are likely to end up acting and talking inconsistently, and certainly they will appear to some as untruthful and dishonest. This is how the politician arrives at his dubious reputation.

The best we can expect of a politician is that her shifting and manoeuvring result in a net benefit to the community, and that her transgressions do not promote a turn of the overall political system toward the destruction of law and decency, as is the case with a totalitarian order.  

To keep politics lawful and decent, we need a strong competitive element, strong oppositional forces, and the ever present, effectual threat of regime change.

If the best private institutions cannot be expected to be perfect, if a marriage or a friendship is bound to have us behave in ways we have grounds to regret, what do we expect of an institution whose purpose is to engage us as opponents?

Contrary to what the (classical) liberal seems to assume, there is no automatism such as "the market", or any other substitute, capable of rendering superfluous the open competition of interests, aims, and values that is carried out in the political realm of a free society.

The interaction of human interests — whether in a marriage, a friendship or in a broader societal context — cannot be reproduced by a clockwork that we wind up to stare at and wonder what happens as the mechanism runs its course. The interaction of human interests is a highly indeterminate business.
 

If we are to remain free, we are dependent on politics, and should be grateful to those who venture into it at the risk of losing their integrity or peace of mind or both. And gratefulness is usefully expressed by an honest effort to comprehend the constraints that put a politician at a high risk to fail morally in larger or smaller ways.

The Theological Element in Economics

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I used to have a colleague who was obsessed with the idea that quoting oneself was an abysmal sin. I never understood his worry, considering content a more potent criterion than origin.

[T]here is more progress in economics to be expected from understanding clearly that all economics, irrespective of its political tone, has a strong and irreducible theological element, than from couching it in terms seeking to establish a false pretence of scientific apodicity.

The source: My sweet self.

I am yet to encounter an economic school that would pay heed to this condition.

The Political Logic of Freedom

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As a philosophical background to my post President Trump — A Victory for Democracy, I offer this excerpt from a paper that I have presented at the University Witten:

Discovery through political competition is not without risks, and it cannot guarantee the absence of severe error, but it is still the best way (1) to incorporate knowledge generated in civil society, (2) to keep politically dominant views exposed to ongoing corroboration and (3) to include the largest possible number of interest groups in the permanent sequel of repeated games that produce effective trust in society, thus bringing about the dynamic equilibrium of dissension and pacification which defines feasible freedom.

Classical liberalism tends to misunderstand or ignore the political logic of freedom, owing to a monadic conception of the rights underlying personal freedom. In theory, these rights are absolute, immutable, and monadic, i.e. attached to and owned by the individual in inalienable form. Under feasible freedom, however, people, in exercising their liberty, negotiate and renegotiate these rights, both in politics and in private transactions. Free citizens constantly renegotiate new permutations of feasible freedom, thereby constantly rewriting the social contract.

We detect an unexpected and rather incongruous similarity of deficiency in socialist ambitions for central planning and liberal calls for a depoliticised society. Both desiderata are based on incomprehension of a vital spontaneous order which concerns the economy in the case of socialism and politics and the state in the case of liberalism. Both political camps underrate or misconstrue the need and the logic of the indispensable discovery procedures required for strong economic performance and, respectively, the feasibility of civil society at large.

As there is no single person or group of persons capable of registering all inputs needed to calculate an efficient allocative distribution, Hayek suggests inclusion of all citizens in a free economy to approximate far better the needed range and quality of information. Analogously, no single person or group of persons is capable of registering the inputs needed to take better political decisions than are available from a regime that guarantees the possibility for all citizens to make their contribution to political decision making. Incongruously, liberalisms akin to Hayek’s insinuate the equivalent of an impersonal central planer by suggesting that observance of certain rules activate automatisms in a free society, notably the market mechanism and the rule of law, that reduce the need of politics to such an extent as to portray freedom as a state of affairs distinguished by the absence of significant levels of politicisation - a visionary predilection that amounts to the disenfranchisement of the public. 

A free society, this is the claim of the present paper, is akin to a free economy, in so far as only the mobilisation of dispersed knowledge lodged in decentralised units (citizens and their organisations) can bring about a discovery process capable of sustaining human relations that make freedom feasible.

Liberalism cannot fulfil its role in a free society unless it acknowledges that its leadership in matters of constitutional integrity does not carry over into the area of legitimate political discretion. And liberalism must recognise that within the boundaries of constitutional integrity there is substantial leeway for political discretion by players of quite distinct emphases of vision. Freedom remains an open-ended project.

In order to establish her meaning and detailed shape, liberty depends on a political infrastructure that engages contestants in a competitive discovery process that is likely to result in eclectic policy outcomes deviating from puristic ideological positions. Adaptability is a survival requirement for any agent participating in the political discovery process. Puristic ideologies fail to stay in touch with the diversity of interests and views that push toward concrete policies. Feasible freedom may be conceived of as a dynamic equilibrium balancing dissension and peaceableness. Approximating the balance requires that the competing agents continuously search for new information about the prospects of their agendas, swiftly adjusting the latter to sustain support and the power to exercise influence. Precise and consistent accounts of freedom such as endeavoured by classical liberalism play an important role in clarifying the rules of the discovery game and the inalienable contours of freedom, but they are too abstract and too general to be able to prejudge the differing aims that people ought to be free to pursue within the competitive political framework of an open access society. Ideologies lend impetus to freedom’s sine qua non: discovery by political competition, but they do so fruitfully only when being capable of changing and renewing themselves in response to the findings elicited by the search.

The success of politics under feasible freedom is to be judged by the ability to balance dissension and peaceableness under the auxiliary conditions of high levels of personal autonomy, productivity, and wealth. We may register good performance and even progress along these lines in the very presence of states of affairs that appear insufferable from a classical liberal point of view. But it should not be forgotten that classical liberalism is just a set of hypotheses, some of which are rejected by freedom. Freedom is not identical with liberalism. Freedom is not identical with liberalism‘s account or expectations of her.

The source.

President Trump — A Victory for Democracy?

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I understand, Donald Trump has won the Presidential election. When I speak of a victory for democracy, I am not ipso facto revealing myself as a raving supporter of Trump. What I am suggesting is that — as in the case of the Brexit, and unlike the referenda in the Netherlands and France or Ireland that were undemocratically ignored by the EU — this time, the people have been able to express a vision of politics opposite to the one they are being asked by the political establishment to take for granted.

We witness the expression of the leanings of large sections of the population that are otherwise ill-represented (by the parties) and largely impotent in the political arena.

Democracy is not about micromanaging a society, instead it is all about expression and control of visions of society and their impact on the life of the people. If the benefits of economic success and growth are no longer reasonably dispersed among the entire population we do have a major democratic concern.

If democracy proves able to represent broad concerns and trends in the population, especially when politicians have drifted far away from these popular inclinations, democracy is doing its job, helping the demos to name its troubles and do something about them.

Notwithstanding rhetoric to the contrary, the Democrats and the Republicans have become a power monolith driven more by special interests than by the existential sorrows of the populace, so much so that a wide democratic current calling the political status quo into question is being demonised as "dangerous populism".

I do think that the balance between capital and labour is out of whack, with inordinate advantages and egotistical excesses accruing to the former at the expense of the latter. Trump's victory may usher in the release of new energies and the budding of new forms suitable to organising the-hard-to-organise, restoring perhaps a rough equilibrium between those who take advantage of the concentrated benefits (accruing to well organised special interests) and those ill-represented and ill-organised who are bearing the dispersed costs of the benefits that go to the few.


See also: The Trump Victory is a Historic Moment.

For a philosophical background of the position taken in this post, read my The Political Logic of Freedom. And Politics — The Dismal Practice.